ORIENTATION TOWARDS CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITIES: A STUDY OF NON-BUSINESS STUDENTS IN HONG KONG

In many ways our livings such as the products and services we are consuming daily, are results of business decisions. As students are future decision-makers of their profession, there is a need to educate them with strong sense of ethicality and corporate social responsibility (CSR) (Evans and Weiss, 2008; Mohammad, 2011). Before we can identify effective ways in changing students' orientation towards CSR (CSRO), we need to first devise a way in assessing CSRO. Using Carroll's (1979) CSR constructs of Economic, Legal, Ethical and Discretionary (Philanthropy), Aupperle (1982) validated a forced-choice scale (E-CSRO) to assess a person's CSRO. Wong (2017) translated it into Chinese (C-CSRO) and tested with N=793 Chinese business students in Hong Kong. This study validated C-CSRO with N=827 non-business Chinese students and examined their CSRO. Samples were randomly halved into two N=383 and N=444. Sample 1 showed C-CSRO has high item reliability (.915 to - .783); Exploratory Factor Analysis revealed its factor structure is similar to E-CSRO. Confirmatory Factor Analysis on Sample 2 supported adequate model fit. Overall mean score ranking of the four CSRO in descending order of importance were Legal, Economic, Ethical and Discretionary. Gender and programme streams in particular have significant effects (p < .05) over the Economic and Discretionary dimensions. Avenues for future research can test C-CSRO in other Chinese communities using cross group CFA on measurement invariance; and explore influence from other demographic variables on CSRO so as to find educational initiatives that are impactful to specific student groups.